Deborama’s Kitchen — Lemon curd, pies, and home economics

Lemon curd. It really wasn’t a thing for us growing up in the southern US, but my Mom made a delicious homemade lemon meringue pie. From scratch except for the fact that she always used the “pie crust mix” that came in “sticks,” like butter. Which at first you think: what a waste of money, what a typical capitalist boondoggle. It saves you maybe three minutes of the pie making process. But look a little closer and there’s a method to her madness (often true of my Mom’s methods.) Flour gets stale if you buy loads of it. Unless you bake all the time this is an issue. And good butter (or Crisco) was not cheap. But “pie crust mix” was cheap, and there was just enough in the little box, with a multi-year shelf-life, to make two to four pies.

And the main filling, underneath the meringue, was really just lemon curd, poured into the par-baked pie shell when not quite set, topped with raw meringue, and popped into a low-medium oven. There, the curd set, the meringue browned lightly, and voila, a lemon pie that tasted so good it made the phony ones at diners and school cafeterias taste — really phony.

Another thing about lemon curd. This same not-quite-set lemon curd is “lemon sauce,” which is one of the many lovely sweet sauces in the British cooking repertoire. We made that, too, my Mom and me, whenever we made gingerbread…